How Social Media’s Obsession with Scale Supercharged Disinformation

Meet the Speaker

Joan Donovan is the Research Director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. Donovan leads the field in examining internet and technology studies, online extremism, media manipulation, and disinformation campaigns.

Donovan leads The Technology and Social Change Project (TaSC). TaSC explores how media manipulation is a means to control public conversation, derail democracy, and disrupt society. TaSC conducts research, develops methods, and facilitates workshops for journalists, policy makers, technologists, and civil society organizations on how to detect, document, and debunk media manipulation campaigns.

Elizabeth M. Renieris

Professor of the Practice; Founding Director, Notre Dame-IBM Technology Ethics Lab

Elizabeth M. Renieris is the Founding Director of the Notre Dame-IBM Technology Ethics Lab, the applied research and development arm of the University of Notre Dame’s Technology Ethics Center, where she helps develop and oversee projects to promote human values in technology.

She is also a Technology and Human Rights Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, a Practitioner Fellow at Stanford’s Digital Civil Society Lab, and an Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.

Elizabeth’s work is focused on cross-border data governance, as well as the ethical challenges and human rights implications of digital identity, blockchain, and other new and advanced technologies.

As the Founder & CEO of HACKYLAWYER, a consultancy focused on law and policy engineering, Elizabeth has advised the World Bank, the U.K. Parliament, the European Commission, and a variety of international organizations and NGOs on these subjects. She’s also working on a forthcoming book about the future of data governance through MIT Press.

Elizabeth holds a Master of Laws from the London School of Economics, a Juris Doctor from Vanderbilt University, and a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard College.

Mark McKenna '97

John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law; Founding Director, Notre Dame Technology Ethics Center

Mark P. McKenna ’97 is the John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law at the Notre Dame Law School and the Director of the Notre Dame Technology Ethics Center. His research focuses on intellectual property and privacy law, with a particular focus on the ways different regulatory regimes interact with each other. He has published more than 50 articles in leading journals and was the author or co-author of five of the ten most-cited articles in his field during the period of a recent study.  

Professor McKenna joined the Notre Dame Law School faculty on a permanent basis in the Fall of 2008 after visiting for a semester in the Spring of 2008. He has also been a visiting professor at Stanford Law School, the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center, and the Turin University-WIPO Master of Laws in Intellectual Property Program. Before entering the academy in 2003, Professor McKenna practiced with the intellectual property firm of Pattishall, McAuliffe, Newbury, Hilliard & Geraldson, where he litigated trademark and copyright cases and advised clients on a variety of intellectual property matters. He is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and the University of Virginia School of Law.  

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Featured Speakers: 

• Joan Donovan, Research Director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard University
• Mark McKenna ’97, John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law; Founding Director, Notre Dame Technology Ethics Center
• Elizabeth M. Renieris, Professor of the Practice; Founding Director, Notre Dame-IBM Technology Ethics Lab